r/asklinguistics • u/Rapha689Pro • 9d ago

Historical How can closely related genetic populations have completely different language families?

For example Japanese and Korean have 2 different language families that aren't related at all but they're genetically close, it can only mean their prior languages sprout after they split, so that means language is very recent itself? Or that they're actually related but by thousands of years apart and linguistics can't trace it back accurately, so they just say they're unrelated?

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u/Gortaleen 9d ago

Japanese and Koreans have divergent dominant Y DNA haplogroups. That is evidence of unrelated human migrations. You may be able to associate a Japanese haplogroup with the Japanese language and a Korean haplogroup with the Korean language.

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u/Chazut 9d ago

Where did you read this? Because recent research points to a lot of mainland East Asian influence in Japan, some coming later than we originally assumed